Research On The Impact Of Economic Policy Uncertainty On Commercial Banks' Risk-takin

Since the outbreak of the global financial crisis triggered by the US subprime mortgage crisis in 2008,countries have frequently introduced policies to regulate the economy,which has increased the uncertainty of economic policies,and the market participants have formed negative expectations on the future economy.The uncertainty of economic policy is closely related to the systemic risk of the banking industry.Commercial banks shoulder the responsibility of transmitting the intention of monetary policy control of the central bank,and the main channel for their earnings is the corresponding risk bearing.When economic policies change frequently,accompanied by the rise of uncertainty,commercial banks will have a significant deviation in the judgment of future policy expectations,which is not conducive to their diversification and risk reduction,resulting in excessive systemic risks in the banking industry.Based on the unbalanced panel data of 77 Chinese commercial banks from 2008 to 2020,this paper confirms the influence of economic policy uncertainty on controllable and uncontrollable risk taking of commercial banks,and further finds that the entrepreneur confidence index and consumer confidence index,which measure the expectation of market entities,play an intermediary role in the influence process.At the same time,from the perspective of bank managers,it explores the moderating effect of bankers’ optimism on the influence of economic policy uncertainty and bank risk taking.Heterogeneity analysis shows that different types of economic policy uncertainty affect bank risk-taking.Economic policy uncertainty has a significant difference in the impact of risk taking on banks with different equity properties and systemically important banks.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)Economic policy uncertainty has a significant negative impact on the controllable risk of commercial banks,which inhibits the controllable risk taking of banks;The uncertainty of economic policy has a significant positive impact on the uncontrollable risks of commercial banks and increases the uncontrollable risk taking of banks.(2)The degree of consumer confidence and entrepreneur confidence has a mediating effect on the influence of controllable risk and uncontrollable risk taking on economic policy uncertainty;(3)Bankers’ optimism has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between economic policy uncertainty and controllable risk taking and uncontrollable risk taking,that is,the higher bankers’ optimism,the greater the inhibition effect on controllable risk taking and uncontrollable risk taking.(4)The influence of different types of economic policy uncertainty on controllable risk and uncontrollable risk taking of banks is heterogeneous,among which the effect of fiscal policy and monetary policy is the most prominent.According to different types of equity banks,the influence of economic policy uncertainty on controllable risk and uncontrollable risk taking of banks is heterogeneous.The influence degree of economic policy uncertainty on state-owned holding banks is small,while the influence degree of economic policy uncertainty on non-state-owned holding banks is high.The influence of economic policy uncertainty on controllable and uncontrollable risk-taking of banks is weaker for systemically important banks than for non-systemically important banks.